My mother opened her eyes. I smiled at her, and she at me, happily. Then I looked at Edgar; I would never have dared wink, but let my eyes linger on his as if to say, ‘Oh, you think you can slather it on? Watch this.’ I inhaled dramatically. ‘It was our own dear Voltaire who first argued that society must be based upon reason and not faith; that natural law must inform civil law, not religion; that society must be democratic and must protect the vulnerable, and that science be based on experiments and observation. Voltaire uses both philosophy and fiction to explore his ideas and transmit them to a wider audience. In our age, we may look to Diderot and others, of course, but always we must return to Voltaire.’
My mother loved Voltaire above all others. She did not wait for his works to appear in English but ordered them, by letter, from Paris as soon as they were published. Her favourite line of his was ‘We are all of us fallible. So let’s forgive each other’s follies.’ She held this to be true, held it very close.
To show I was finished, I took a bow. I looked first at Edgar, who now had his eyes wide, and then at my mother, who had hers closed once more. She was nodding calmly with her left hand laid flat on the table. My father placed his hand over my mother’s, gently rubbing her skin with his thumb. She opened her eyes and smiled at him.
Later, in our shared bedroom, after our parents had said we may retire – two men in their twenties being told to go to bed – Edgar talked extensively about what the Tour would be. He spoke breathlessly about all the good people we would meet, and the good experiences we would have. Now that our mother was nowhere near, he hardly mentioned the Enlightenment. He was fantasising about parties and balls, fashionable society, excellent chaps and pretty girls.
Lying on my bed, as I let Edgar chatter around me, I stared up at the ceiling. A long crack ran through it, created by the settling of the house over many years. As Edgar was gushing about our futures with an enthusiasm at once beguiling and a little silly, I traced the line’s shape with my eyes and imagined it as a route that the two of us would follow. At points, it shifted direction slightly – south to Paris, then east towards Lorraine – or ran into a squiggling fissure – the journey through the Alps’ narrow valleys – and then arched out perfectly, as if drawn by a draughtsman’s hand – in the direction of the Italian cities.
‘Do you think there will be lots of pretty girls?’ Edgar asked, his question urgent and heady with possibility. Now and then my brother talked of girls, but I did not join in with him, and I did not do so now. I am not interested in girls.
As a boy, I would occasionally borrow a book of etchings from my mother’s library and, in the middle of the day, take it up to our bedroom, softly turning the key in the lock. Staring at the rippling muscles and taut bellies rendered so beautifully by the hands of the Old Masters, my cock would grow hard and I would feel ashamed.
Edgar and I knew nothing of girls. But there were things I knew about myself, in all my lonely innocence. Once, I overheard one of the kitchen maids saying that Edgar and I were ‘probably both sodomites’. I asked Herr Hof what the word meant. He refused to tell me then, but the next day a street pamphlet was left, upside-down and unacknowledged, on my bedside table. It reported how two boys, aged seventeen and fifteen, had been found in the Park. They claimed they had been there only to rob, but they were found guilty of importuning men for sodomy. They were to be hanged. The story reported how the court gallery cheered when the boys were sentenced to die for their sin – a sin that was also a capital crime. I read the pamphlet in horror, knowing I had those same impulses. I felt that horror pulse through me: was this the fate awaiting someone like me? The next day, Herr Hof asked me to tell him which maid had said ‘that thing’. He would get her dismissed. I said I did not know which. He insisted, but I maintained I did not know, although in fact I did.
‘Benjamin! Benjamin!’
‘What?’ I groaned, turning on my bed to look at my brother.
Edgar’s eyes were as bright as torches. ‘Do you think there will be lots of pretty girls on the Tour?’
I laughed. ‘Yes, I expect so.’
‘Yes,’ Edgar sighed. ‘English girls are the prettiest in the world.’
‘Are they?’ I asked, laughing. ‘How would we know?’
Edgar faced me, then, his brow furrowed, a curious look in his eye. He did not see things as I did, perhaps.
A footman came and knocked on the door, saying that our father had sent him to check that we were undressed for bed. So we changed into our night things and slipped under the covers. Edgar and I had always shared a room; even though there were sufficient rooms in our house for us each to have our own, it did not occur to us that we might not. I lay in the darkness for a long time. Eventually, I realised that the rustling sound I could hear was not the mice who came through our floorboards at night: it was Edgar, masturbating. I turned on my side, pushing my ear deep into my pillow. Two minutes passed, I heard a sharp little breath, then nothing, until finally the sounds of Edgar’s shallow sleep-breathing.
I opened my eyes and, as I got used to the darkness, stared back up at the ceiling until I could again see the crack. I was thinking of the world that was out there, beyond Red Lion Square, beyond London, and I was both excited and afraid.
Perhaps parents always choose to deceive their children. Perhaps the lies a mother tells her sons, or a father tells his daughters, are as natural as air. Sometimes deceptions are direct, harshly known. Only when we went on Tour did I come to understand that in that house, Edgar and I were not raised in the spirit of the truth.
The first deceit might have been my father’s violence. He was violent in his mind, in his utter belief that the Company, and our role in its future (more than it in ours), was all that mattered. How he used to rage at us during our visits to the Company offices on Moorgate, when we did not understand, or did not care enough! ‘Do you have any questions, Benjamin?’ ‘Nothing about the implications of depreciation on the older ships?’ ‘You have to take this seriously, Benjamin! This is going to be the rest of your life, and the Company has to be the most important thing in your life! It is going to be every day for the rest of your days, and your brother’s!’
As I have said, my father’s presence was both quieter and darker than my mother’s. But the truth was I was afraid of my father – physically afraid. When we were children, even for minor infractions he would whip us with his belt, or hold us down on a bed and knock our skulls together until we were dazed. ‘Don’t tell your mother!’ he would warn us, whenever he went too far.
As we grew older, he ceased beating us in that way. I do not know why he stopped. He could not possibly have been afraid of us. Once, when I was about thirteen, I saw my father beat a debtor to the Company half to death in front of his staff. He punched the man repeatedly until his face was covered in blood: my father wild with fury, out of control, unable to restrain himself, like a dog with bared teeth; the debtor, in seconds, a bloodied ragdoll hanging from my father’s raw-knuckled fists. It was the most frightening thing I had seen in my life. What I remember most harrowingly were my father’s eyes connecting with mine as his rage wore down and he let the debtor go, the man crashing to his knees. I will never forget the look in his eyes then: that mix of fury and shame, anger and regret. He made me swear not to tell Mother or Edgar, and I kept his secret, and in doing so I became his conspirator, his accomplice. I hated him for asking me to do so, but I obeyed.